As the former Prince of Dallas and winner of the 2008 Texas VTES Qualifier, I took it upon myself to design decks for beginners. My goal was to design decks that were competitive enough to play with other people’s tournament decks but inexpensive enough to give the decks away to beginners without flinching. Truth be told, this project has become a bit of an obsession of mine. I found that the time I devoted to tuning and refining these decks took my mind off of the other problems in my life. Although I know this confession brands me a geek, these decks represent well over 80 hours of design, testing, and play.

These decks win. Whenever I get frustrated with the current decks I’m working on, I always just reach for one of these. It leads to some humorous interactions with other players. I remember in one game, a local player was testing this !Salubri deck that used Concealed Weapon/Garrot/Sword of Righteousness combo to burn everyone’s vamps. I was playing the beginner Brujah deck and he rushed Tura Vaughn and did his combo. I responded by playing fast hands to steal his Garrot with First Strike, then playing blur to send him to torpor and burn the Garott to burn his vamp. Great fun. I even picked up a couple of VPs playing with these decks in casual games at the 2006 North American Championship- a collection of the best players in North America.

Each deck includes a 60 card library (which works out just fine for a 4 player game) and a 12 card crypt. The flavor of the clans is well preserved in each of the decks: the Ventrue vote, the Gangrel fight, the Malkavians bleed at stealth, etc. The vast majority of these cards are from the base Jyhad set, but I did stretch to include some cards such as Animal Magnetism and Pack Alpha that help a particular strategy.

In fact, check out the feedback I’ve gotten through Ebay sales over the years.

One winner of this auction in England sent this email. “Thank you so much! The decks have arrived. I have played a couple of games already – Torreadors got me a win and nosferatu got 2nd place in two 4-way games. Great strategy notes with them. As I am new to the game, they came in very handy, particularly with the Torreador (a wall deck). Thanks again! I have left positive feedback.”

Thanx for the decks! I played the brujah deck last night and it ripped up everyones f’in vampires. They said it’s a bruise and bleed deck. Can’t wait to try out the others.

A new player wrote me from Italy to say, “Hello, I would like to thank you for the great job you have done with these decks. I like them very much. Expecially the Malkavian deck always led me to victory when I play with it and I’m never be able to stop it when I play against it with any other deck.”

Mark Loughman, a VTES player and game store owner in Columbus Ohio, told me that a player who frequents his store bought a set of these decks from me and that the decks were well helpful for new players. Mark said that the player was able to take my designs and look for ways to improve upon them, which got him trading for other cards and interacting with the larger VTES group.

My experience in playing and selling these decks for over three years has left me so confident that I am going to offer a money back guarantee.

If in the first 30 days you don’t feel they were worth the money you paid, just ship’em back to me and I’ll credit you with a full refund. International shipping is $17 for airmail unless the United States Postal Service charges me a bunch more. You can check for yourself at www.usps.com

Because these decks are for beginners, I have typed up a strategy guide for each deck that includes a list of errata on any of the cards in the deck list (so they will know that Concealed Weapon doesn’t require Obfuscate for instance). In addition, I can also take these errata notes, print them on Return Address Labels, and stick them on the face of the card so that all the relevant information is right there. Note: The cards will be entirely blank and unmolested unless you request this, but it is a free service. Even if you just wanted to buy these decks to play test. Say you wanted to see how your new deck will fare in a tournament, play a 4 player game with your new deck, the Malkavian deck, the Ventrue deck, and the Gangrel deck and you will see how it does against combat, sneak and bleed, and a voter deck.

If you were to buy these cards seperately, their full retail price is roughly $80. If you’d like to see an exact listing of all the cards you get in this batch of seven decks, as well as how I calculated that value, CLICK HERE.

If you’d like to buy my VTES starter decks you can use Google Checkout. This Google Checkout button charges $49.99 for shipping out a set of 7 decks to anywhere in the Domestic United States.

This button, on the other hand, if for my international clients. For $65.99, I will ship these decks most anywhere in the world. If the United States Postal Service comes back and says it’s going to cost a bunch more to ship to North Korea, I’ll let you know, but I’ve shipped to Australia, Europe, and Central America without a problem.

It was a challenge to try to make a playable Tremere deck from Jyhad commons. As I mentioned in my last post, the Tremere have to have some sort of combat package: it helps to get your bleeds through and you won’t have to block as many actions if you torpor/burn the minions you do block. The combat options for Thaumaturgy in the basic Jyhad set are limited to:

Blood Rage or Blood Fury

Theft of Vitae

Walk of Flame

Drain Essence

Walk of Flame is a powerful card, but it (like Cauldron of Blood and Drain Essence) requires you to make it beyond the first round of combat, and that requires some form of press based combat. I found from play testing that Traps worked quite well with the overall combat package. You could drain off the opposing vampires blood with a Theft in the first round and, if all went well, burn the opposing minion with a Walk of Flame in the subsequent rounds. That makes for a fairly threatening combat package. It can’t deal with a strike to end combat, but that’s something the Tremere are notorious for having a problem with.

As my personal friends know, I’m a gamer geek. My collectible card game (CCG) of choice is Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (VTES). It’s Richard Garfield’s (the designer of Magic: the Gathering) second CCG and he designed it for multiple players. It’s a game I enjoy playing competitively.

Every year, White Wolf (the company that publishes VTES has a North American Championship. In order to play in this tournament, you first have to do well in a qualifier tournament which every region has. This weekend, Los Angeles had its qualifier tournament and I enjoyed playing in it (I didn’t qualify). Since VTES has a small but loyal player base compared to other CCGs, you get to know everyone pretty well who competes on a national level. We’ve become a pretty close knit group despite the fact that we all live in different regions; our willingness to travel and our love of the game brings us together.

Well known members of this tight-knit circle include Ben Peal, and a married couple, Robin and David Tatu. They have all purchased my book and found it a good read. Both of the Tatu’s were at the tournament this weekend, and I commented to them that my investments were up some 50% over the last six months. They recommended that I sell my gold investments before they crashed. Now, I found it a bit peculiar that two people who told me that they learned a great deal about how the economy works from the book that I wrote would then tell me to sell gold.

It does make sense in a human nature kind of way. The knee jerk response I’ve gotten when I tell people how much money I’ve made off of my gold investments is “Sell!” It’s a bit of conventional wisdom that has its roots in reality. After all, trees don’t grow to the sky and what goes up must come down. If something’s up 50%, then it must be time to sell it.